Though Newsmax is in large part a Trump stenography service, it occasionally remembers that it’s supposed to be a “news” organization and acts like on even when it comes to Trump. An Aug. 29 article by Solange Reyner began as typical Trump stenography:
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday said he will vote to end Florida’s proposed constitutional amendment that would overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban, telling the Daily Mail he thinks it should be more than six weeks.
After the interview Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary, stressed the candidate did not say which way he would vote.
“President Trump has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida, he simply reiterated that he believes six weeks is too short,” Leavitt wrote in a statement.
“Well, I do know” how I will vote, “but I do want more than six weeks,” he told the news outlet in an interview conducted from his Mar-a-Lago home.
“I want more than six weeks. I think six weeks is a mistake. And I’ll be expressing that soon, but I want more than six weeks. And in Florida, we have a six-week program, and that’s what I believe that you’re voting on, and I think it should be more than six weeks.”
But Trump’s statement deviated from the right-wing anti-abortion agenda, which calls for more draconian anti-abortion laws. An Aug. 30 article by Sandy Fitzgerald gave a platform to the cleanup operation:
Former President Donald Trump’s team is insisting that even though he says he might support a Florida ballot initiative that would expand abortion rights, he has not yet said whether he will vote in November for the measure.
“He simply reiterated that he believes six weeks is too short,” Karoline Leavitt, the Republican nominee’s national press secretary, commented Thursday night, adding that he “has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida, reports The New York Times.
Trump, during an interview with NBC News on Thursday, stopped short of a full endorsement of Florida’s Amendment 4, which would guarantee the right to an abortion “before viability,” at around 24 weeks of pregnancy. Current Florida law prohibits abortion after six weeks.
Fitzgerald noted that some anti-abortion groups called out Trump (though one quickly walked back her criticism):
Trump on Thursday came under fire from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. Its president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, said in a statement that while Trump has “consistently opposed abortions after five months of pregnancy,” a vote for Amendment 4 “completely undermines his position.”
Later, the group issued a correction, after Dannenfelser said she spoke with Trump.
“He has not committed to how he will vote on Amendment 4,” she said.
Meanwhile, prominent anti-abortion activist Lila Rose, who has been urging her followers not to vote for Trump unless he changes course on his abortion message, spoke out on X Thursday about Trump’s comments on the Florida legislation and about his promise that if elected, he will push for insurance companies to cover IVF procedures in full.
“What should the pro-life movement do when the RNC and the formerly pro-life presidential candidate abandons the pro-life position?” the Live Action founder said. “Elections are about the FUTURE, not the past.”
A Sept. 3 column by Daniel McCarthy admitted Trump is wishy-washy on abortion, but insisted that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are the the extremists:
There are two uncompromising sides in the abortion debate — and then there’s the middle, which is where most Americans are.
It’s also where Donald Trump is: He’s best described as a pro-life moderate.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, on the other hand, are neither pro-life nor moderate.
The Democratic ticket wants to impose one policy on the whole country, a policy to allow abortion up to the point of birth — or even beyond.
[…]A sure sign Trump and Vance occupy the middle ground is that they’re being criticized by the right as well as the left, while no abortion supporter, however radical, feels a need to criticize Harris and Walz.
The staunchest pro-lifers don’t want to settle for Trump’s compromise, but the alternative on the ballot in November isn’t an absolute anti-abortion position. It’s the absolute abortion-supporting position of Harris and Walz.
McCarthy also huffed: “Walz went as far as to lie about his own wife’s fertility treatments, pretending she received IVF so he could falsely claim about Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, that ‘If it was up to him, I wouldn’t have a family because of IVF.’ The truth is Vance supports IVF — and Walz’s wife never had it.” Walz’s wife had an IVF-adjacent procedure that is fundamentally the same as IVF.